hi guys. today i installed the original lightroom CC and the desktop version on my newly bought laptop.


its an i5-7300hq
4gb of ram.
nvidia geforce 1050
hard disk. not ssd

and unfortunately for me, it seems that the overall performance of the laptop when using adobe lightroom is still considerably*annoyingly* slow.

i came from an i7-3rd gen QM machine (cant remember what model), with 4gb of ram, and also normal hard disk (although it was running cc2015 version of lightroom), it seems that my old machine is somewhat more responsive and faster. wonder what else should i do? considering to try out ryzen series machine. but not sure how it will affect the performance.

anybody got some real world experience with the latest adobe lightroom, in regards to the performance of the machine used, what type of proc/ram/etc combo? maybe u guys found a good combination which works with adobe lightroom well?


i noticed a considerable performance boost when using adobe premiere pro on my new laptop, as compared to my old laptop. but sadly, not the case with adobe lightroom.

any thoughts guys?

guyyss. any thoughts?

preferably 16gb ram.. my 2012 mbp also lagging a bit with 16gb ram hahaha

upgrading RAM & storage to SSD would help
as you load photo from HDD, will be abit slower.

mostly the time u feel slow is when pixelpeeping (zooming into photo)
one of the option is to render smart preview and 1:1.
will take abit of your time initially to render, but then smooth editing.

yeah. thought about the ram bit. saw the recommended ram requirements at 8gb as adobe put it on their site. but was thinking about which component to change first, the ram, ssd, or the processor.

16gb ram should do the trick well i suppose. more dang more money

my current closest options are either to upgrade to a larger ssd (which i will put all files there, and also run the os/lightroom from the ssd too), or 8 gb of ram.

or i could sell my laptop and go for ryzen system (if any major differences exists)

ssd is probably the way to first yeah?

if u could upgrade to 8gb of RAM would be nice too.
SSD is cheaper now , get 240gb is less than rm200 only.
i'd suggest to get 480gb at least, as you wont have space if have a lot of files (for editing).

i did this workflow below when editing file.
store images on hdd (external hdd is fine)
render smart preview on ssd
editing goes very smoothly
LR will pull the data from original file only when u exporting.

mind sharing the laptop make/model?
at least we can know if it has additional hdd/ssd bracket or support m.2 type ssd.
and to find out how many RAM slot it has.

ssd is must. now ssd price is quite affordable. 480gb for rm300+

atleast add more 4 gb of ram. thats the bare minimum. editing software like photoshop/lightroom tend to eat up memory. i'd recomend you upgrade ssd first than ram.

its the lenovo y520. i5 7300hq, 4gb ddr4, 1tb hdd. or if lenovo is reading this, maybe you guys wanna sponsor me the y7 series? (thot it'd be worth a shot )

yeah seems like you're workflow is more convenient, and probably put less load on the system. never thought about that smart preview thing. will try that one out first. and ssd seems to be my best next upgrade for now yeah? i saw on youtube that the more space an ssd have, it will generally perform a bit better than the lower capacity ones. probably the best option for me now is the 480gb.

it says on the deck, it does have an additional PCIe ssd storage slot. and i think (guessing) it also have an additional ram slot.

*money fly*

yeah. ssd then ram. probably will buy the ssd first, then sell the 4gb ram piece for a 8gb piece. seems like like the logical option for now

per spec sheet
does say that it has m.2 pcie slot as well.
just bring to a reputable shop and ask them to pasang m.2 type
then maintain your current hdd.
but need to migrate windows into the ssd

this video show it has 2 ram slot
not sure of the speed

Ryzen won't help, given their TDP is 15W-25W, which limits the clock speed severely. AMD has yet to come out with something high TDP, which might be possible to perform better than your HQ.

yeah. ssd + ram. will update here how it goes when the SSD arrives

thanks bro! appreciate it

hmm. dang i'm so keen on getting ryzen and wanting to try them out on lightroom. i suppose will hold off for now.

i5 7300HQ isn't a bad processor to start with. You need more RAM and SSD.
I used to do raw processing on photoshop with 2 cores i5 for few years, worked fine.
If you are processing those 42MP, 46MP files, then better off doing it on desktop.

This post has been edited by kingkingyyk: Jan 3 2019, 06:27 PM

yeah bro. photoshop seems to be running just fine. no issue with photoshop yet so far.

but lightroom is a totally different story ni my case. so far i edit mostly max 24mp raw photos. and with lightroom, its annoyingly slow enough. annoying enough that importing photos will get me to bed first before its done.

yup. currently waiting for the ssd to arrive. pretty sure now it'll do wonders in lightroom as well.